AT&T 8525 PDA Smartphone Great for Road Warriors and Stay at Home Types

AT&T 8525

AT&T 8525 PDA Smart Phone

AT&T 8525

Which cell phone is 3G UMTS/HSDPA as well as GSM/GRPS/EDGE? Which one has a sliding QWERTY keyboard? Which one has a 2MP camera/video and flash? Which one has all this and connection features that include Bluetooth, Wi-Fi and infrared? If that is not enough to get your attention, which one can lend your laptop a modem/internet sharing to connect by?

It is the previously known as Cingular 8525 - now known as the AT&T 8525 (also known as HTC Hermes). I guess you could say that this is a phone in transition. When Cingular became AT&T the 8525 was subject to a ROM upgrade. We have been promised by AT&T that the 8525 will receive a free upgrade from Windows Mobile 5 to Windows Mobile 6 sometime in the 3rd Qtr of 2007 (UPDATE:This free upgrade did come through. I really like Mobile 6 better than Mobile 5. Now I can log into webpages and I can read HTML emails. My 8525 is now much more useful to me.)

This is a PDA phone that can really work well for anyone that enjoys working with Microsoft Office programs - Outlook, Word, Excel and PowerPoint that can be viewed and edited on the go.

I started having an issue connecting to my email so after a bit of research I made a few changes. My email is with Earthlink so I originally had my setup as incoming (pop.earthlink.net) and my outgoing (smtpauth.earthlink.net). Now I have changed my outgoing to (cwmx.com). This is the AT&T setting and I have had no problems since.

The Push-to-Talk does not work at this time but that it OK with me. I simply set my email preferences to check my email every 15 minutes and it is always there waiting for me. I could set it to check more often.

Battery life has not been an issue for me. It is rated at 4 hours talk time and 8.3 days standby time. There is a battery icon on the main screen and I check it periodically through the day. Most of the time I have 60 to 90% battery life left, and that is after a full day of wearing my Bluetooth wireless headset, checking email and looking at a few websites. I turn the 8525 off most nights but not always. I plug it into power every once in a while just to keep the charge high incase I need to push the phone past normal usage.

Overall I think that this is a good looking very functional PDA Smartphone. It has all phone functions found on any other high end cell phone. I cannot think of many other things that I would want to do that I am unable to do. I love the slide out QWERTY keyboard and I am willing to put up with a bit more bulk and weight for it. This is a rather expensive phone but if you buy it from a site like Amazon you will save a lot of money.

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bowchickawowwow 9 years ago

this phone is da bomb!!! it's really cool!

sjkugb 9 years ago

this is a phone

it is a real phone

i like it

ALOT ALOT AOLT

mary 9 years ago

Great hub and its nice to see there is a bit of discussion from real users of such devices.

3gneo 9 years ago

Overall I think Windows Mobile is pretty lame. It's slow on the 8525 and there are way too many buttons and items to click to get the basics done. I'm not sure how you got Youtube working. Doesn't work (and never did) on my 8525. Realplayer keeps complaining that it doesn't understand the format. Also, many suggests are on the net but so far none have worked for me. You can google &quot;8525 Youtube problem&quot; and you'll see thousands of hits.

Author

Debbie Cook 10 years agofrom USA

I agree with part of this, but the button on the upper right hand side brings the screen back so that you can use the key pad. It is not unusal for a touch screen to go blank when using the phone function. You could also slide out the keyboard to use those keys. Both of these options are easy to use with a bluetooth ear piece.

I like that the other funtions show up as soon as the number is dialed. The keypad button is easily accessed and you do not have to hunt for the other functions while you are waiting for the other person to answer their phone.

jvtelphi 10 years ago

The phone functions are annoying. Once the PDA starts to dial from the pop-up keypad on the screen, the keypad disappears, and switches to a function with options to turn speaker on/off, mute and end.

If you are connected to a phone with computer instructions as:push 3 if you know the extension #, push 0 to speak to the operator, etc, you are left in a stupid situation where you have to look for the button to display the phone keypad again. Then you lose that call, since you are in other pages you did not want.